SANKOFA AS A SYMBOL OF (RE)PRESENTATION AND REVISITATION OF AFRICANS IN WABERI’S WHY DO YOU DANCE WHEN YOU WALK?

Abstract

Both the young and the old in Africa perceive many traditional African values as outdated or barbaric as the the contemporary world may be where people live ‘a trash life’. Therefore, there is need to understand and adhere to Sankofa as the core concept in this paper which advocates to go to the past and retrieve good and lost morals of the African sages. Paucity of studies on Sankofa as African authors write on politics, satire, poverty, lack of education, and gender disparity. This paper adopts John Brannigan’s theory of new historicism (1998) which posits that defamiliarising the canonical literary texts challenging state power that every fact and idea in life must be textualised. In Waberi’s Why Do You Dance When You Dance?, Sankofa, as the African concept of (re)presentation and revisitation of African identity is depicted in the character of Bea who is taught the past about her people as her father teaches her moral values via storytelling which serves as a therapy to navigate the world using ideas learnt from stories told to her. This paper concludes that going back to the past, learning past ideas and essential values in a distinct way assists Africa and Africans in this present age that moral values have become increasingly blurred in terms of values and morals among both the young and the old. Therefore, Sankofa is to be considered a theory of revisitation, (re)presentation, and dewhitisation in African and diasporic Literature.